Coded Argent Automation on Eighteenth-Century Necks: The Representations of Enslaved Black Boys in French Portraiture

Abstract

This essay examines the overt and covert exhibition of European colonial violence on the silver collared necks of black male children portrayed as enslaved workers in French aristocratic and haute bourgeois portraits by Philippe Vignon and Nicolas de Largillière. I argue that the collar portrays practices of human trafficking and the illegal disregard of Louis XIV’s 1685 Code Noir. More scholarship is needed on the actual material culture of these silver slave collars utilized on African or Caribbean subjects in elite households as visible instruments of illicit ownership and mechanization of the body. Since slavery was not permitted on French mainland soil, the use of the silver slave collar on a Black child in European households depicts a desire to “tame” or “mechanize” the black body for full control with a key, when the body is in fact, legally free. As visible methods of discipline and restriction, the slave collar’s identity was clear until it encompassed the tiny necks of black male youth during the French Rococo.